Language Evolution, Literary Craft, and Aesthetic Mysticism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Theory of Style

Robert Louis Stevenson’s essays on literary style construct a complex theory of creative practice in which deliberate, calculated authorial choices intermingle with mysterious intuitions and unconscious compulsions. The article argues that this theory resisted efforts in late Victorian culture and education to methodize writing as an instrumental skill reducible to fixed, objective rules. Drawing on evolutionary models of language and aesthetics, which problematized the conventional opposition between thought and discourse, inspiration and production, Stevenson appealed to an expansive concept of craft in which practitioners simultaneously used their tools and were shaped and guided by them. However, he envisaged intellect and tact existing in composition less as a balance than as a tension so that the former managed the instinctive pleasures of pattern-making with increasing self-consciousness as humanity advanced. His theory of style thus engaged with a wider discourse of optimistic evolutionary aestheticism which envisioned humanity progressing towards perfection through the transcendental developments of art and literature. It also resonates suggestively with contemporary theories of ‘craft consciousness’ and linguistic-aesthetic enchantment as sources of resistance and ideological disruption. Stevenson’s phenomenology of literary style further offers a historical analogue to ecocritical concepts of language as a means of connecting to the wider universe.